Zero: Its origin in India and its acceptance by the rest of the world.

1. ‘Zero’ the ingenuity of our
fore-fathers
Zero is a strange number and one of the greatest
paradoxes of human thought. It means both everything
and nothing.
Without zero, not just mathematics, but all branches of
sciences would have struggled for clearer definitions.
Zero is a tiny number but never ignore it!!!

2. Origin of Zero
• Perhaps, the word zero probably came
from the Sanskrit word shunyam or the
Hindi equivalent shunya. The word
shunyam was translated to Arabic as Al-
sifer. Fibonacci mentioned it as cifra from
which we have our present day cipher,
meaning empty space. From this original
Italian word or from the alteration of
Medieval Latin zephirum, the present word
zero might have originated.

3. Existence of Zero
• Initially, zero was not
considered a number.
There was the idea of
empty space, which may
be thought conceptually
similar to zero.
• Babylonians around 700
BC used two hooks to
denote an empty space in
the positional notation.

4. Zero in India
• Around AD 650, the use of
zero as a number came into
Indian mathematics.
• The Indians used a place-
value system and zero was
used to denote an empty
space.
• Aryabhata devised a number
system, which had no zero, as
a positional system, but used
to denote empty space. There
is evidence that a dot had
been used in earlier
manuscripts to denote an
empty space in positional
notation.

5. Mathematicians of India
Post-Vedic Sanskrit to Pala period mathematicians (5th c. BC to 11th c. AD)
• Aryabhata - Astronomer who gave accurate calculations for astronomical constants,
476AD-520AD
• Aryabhata II
• Bhaskara I
• Brahmagupta - Helped bring the concept of zero into arithmetic (598 AD-670 AD)
• Bhāskara II
• Mahavira
• Pavuluri Mallana - the first Telugu Mathematician
• Varahamihira
• Shridhara (between 650-850) - Gave a good rule for finding the volume of a sphere.
Born in 1800s
• Ramchandra (1821–1880)
• Ganesh Prasad (1876–1935)
• Srinivasa Lyengana Ramanujan (1887–1920)
• A. A. Krishnaswami Ayyangar (1892–1953)

6. From India to the World
• The Islamic and the Arabic
mathematicians took the idea
of the indian mathematicians
further west. Al-Khwarizmi
described the Indian place-
value system of numerals
based on zero and other
numerals. Ibn Ezra, in the 12th
century, wrote The Book of the
Number, which spread the
concepts of the Indian numeral
symbols and decimal fractions
to Europe.

7. Acceptance of Zero
• The concept of zero took some time for
acceptance. It was only around 1600 that
zero began to come into widespread use
after encountering a lot of support and
also criticism from mathematicians from
the world.

8. Unique Number
• The number 0 is neither positive nor
negative and appears in the middle of a
number line. It is neither a prime number
nor a composite number. It cannot be a
prime because it has infinite number of
factors and cannot be expressed by
multiplying prime numbers (0 must always
be one of the factors).

9. Mighty Naught
• The power of zero is
sequenced in the
following expression.
The number in each
power indicates the
number of zeros that
should follow after 1.

10. S. Ramanujan
• Srīnivāsa Rāmānujan was
an Indian mathematician and autodidact who, with almost no formal
training in pure mathematics, made extraordinary contributions to
mathematical analysis, number theory, infinity series and continued
fractions. Ramanujan was said to be a natural genius by the English
mathematician G.H. Hardy, in the same league as mathematicians
like Euler and Gauss.
• Once Hardy arrived at Ramanujan's residence in a cab numbered
1729. Hardy commented that the number 1729 seemed to be
uninteresting. Ramanujan is said to have stated on the spot that it
was actually a very interesting number mathematically, being the
smallest natural number representable in two different ways as a
sum of two positive cubes: